Justice Reach, Thaibodia, & Joyful Expectation

Justice Reach Discipleship Training School, January 2015

Eight weeks...I can’t help but be in awe of all of the things God has done. When I did my DTS, I couldn’t imagine any group being closer than ours. This school is a pretty close second. The love that the students have for God, the staff and each other is daily an encouragement to me. The relationships I've built with them as well as the other staff are a great joy in my life.

I have seven one on ones, each of them so incredibly special. I have enjoyed getting to walk this journey with them, and am excited to have six of them on my outreach team. Over the past few weeks, I have had the privilege of really getting to know all of the students better. I love this group that God has so intricately put together. 

We are headed into our ninth week of lectures, having already covered Orientation Week, Worship & Intercession, Nature & Character of God, Hearing God’s Voice, Relationships, Identity, Fear of the Lord and a Justice Panel Week. We didn't cover Fear of the Lord on my DTS, so I went into that week without any expectations. What God spoke through the teaching had me sitting in awe the entire week. He has had me on this journey the past year or so of really wanting to learn what it looks like to live a life of whole-hearted surrender and abandon to Him. To truly live a life holy and set apart. Turns out, this has been something of a theme throughout this school. On Friday, Fear of the Lord week culminated in a bonfire where everyone, students and staff, repented of things and took turns praying for one another. It was so great to see them minister to one another as they experienced freedom from the bondage of various strongholds that they threw into the fire.

Over the course of this school, God has been dealing with something in me that I didn't even fully realize was there. He revealed the self-hate in my heart and had me deal with it. I can't explain what happened as I threw symbols of my self-hate in the fire and felt this stronghold break off of me. Even though this is going to be a daily healing process and re-wiring of how I view myself, a new freedom and joy have become a huge part of me.

I also began teaching an inductive Bible study on spiritual warfare a few weeks ago for some of the girls who were interested. We are currently going through Ephesians, establishing a foundation so that we know the power and promises we have in Christ. This will enable us to stand firm and unwavering as we begin to take authority, knowing where that authority comes from. This study has been so amazing, and what I'm learning from Ephesians applies to so many areas of my life. During this week's teaching, I didn't talk about anything I had actually prepared, but instead God was speaking through me and giving me revelation as I was teaching. He is just so cool, and I am daily ready in joyful expectation of what He wants to teach me.

We have also established our outreach locations! I will be co-leading a team to Thailand and Cambodia, which we are now calling the Thaibodia Team. I’m excited to see what God does during our time in these countries. Our team will consist of fifteen students and three staff. We will be in Thailand for about four weeks and Cambodia for about three. Our planning is going well, the team is doing research about various aspects of the culture in these nations, and presenting their findings to the group. We have a rather large team, and I'm excited to see what God's plans are for us during outreach. We will be splitting into two smaller teams for ministry times, and the leaders will rotate leading each team every other week. 

During my time here, I have been able to catch up with some friends from my DTS. It's been awesome getting to see Erin and Michael as they visited for her sister's wedding. Hannah was here when I arrived, but left a few days later to lead her first outreach. Our school had the honor of hosting their graduation when they came back a few weeks ago. 

Justice Reach is involved in a few local outreaches throughout the lecture phase. We had the opportunity to help clean up an event that a local church put on in a park for the people of Tauranga. In a few weeks we will be doing an Easter celebration for some of the foster families in this area.

My fellow staffers. We are such a random bunch of people, 

but I love how He makes that work. It's a good picture of how the body 

is supposed to function together. Love them!

Mis-sion-ar-y [mish-uh-ner-ee] : Christ Follower

“I mean, how do you explain the difference between a Christian and a missionary to people?”

This question was posed to me a few months ago. As followers of Christ, we are called to be missionaries. A Christian and a missionary are not meant to be separate. They are one and the same. To pursue Christ with reckless abandon, passion and intentionality is something that is all encompassing. Part of that is the role as missionary.

Sadly, as a church, we have taken something that God meant to be part of our identity in Christ, and redefined it:

Mis-sion-ar-y [mish-uh-ner-ee] : the title of one who desires to share the good news full-time, as in a career.

We have glorified this definition of missionary. We have idolized those who have traveled miles to serve God. Some of us have even wished that God had created us the same way He created those He takes across oceans to share His love.

Seeing and experiencing this brokenness within the body breaks my heart. To pursue Christ with reckless abandon, passion and intentionality does not necessarily mean travelling to another continent. I thank God for those that He does call to devote their time to serving another’s physical and spiritual needs in other nations. The way He connects us across cultures and barriers is truly inspiring in itself.

But for you, followers of Christ, you who do not feel you have a “career calling” to become pastors, worship leaders, Biblical teachers, travelling missionaries… you are mistaken if you think your witness means less than those who have a “career calling” to ministry.

See, this is the true definition of missionary:

Mis-sion-ar-y [mish-uh-ner-ee] : Christ Follower

“And he answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.’” Luke 10:27

We are called to love God first and then love people. Scripture does say in Mark 16:15 to “Go into all the world and preach the Good News to everyone.” I’m not discounting that. But this scripture says “all the world”, and we have to trust that God is sovereign. That He will take us where He wants us to be and that He will use us in that place. No matter where we are, we are called to share His love. In Luke 10:27, we are simply called to love our neighbor. This means those that God has placed us in community with, and those that we encounter on an every day basis.

Youth With a Mission is an amazing missions organization. The vision and mission is to see people loving God, experiencing His love and going into the nations and sharing the gospel. They have schools called Discipleship Training Schools (DTS) all over the world. These are intense programs of learning about who God is and growing in Him as you deal with brokenness and come to a place where you are walking in freedom and healing in order to then go out and minister to the people of this world.

I attended one of these schools earlier last year, and doing that was one of the best decisions I have ever made. Through that experience, God helped me re-define my definition of missionary. In fact, He replaced my definition with one that is His own.

I want to recognize the hard things missionaries across oceans encounter. Sometimes they are nothing like what we experience in our own hometowns and communities. As they chase God and His calling with abandon, the world rejects them and spiritual warfare surrounds them. Such a life is something that many of us fear, but I would not wish a life full of contentment found in the world for anyone. Jesus promises that in Him is where we will find peace, and in the world we will find tribulations (John 16:33).

I encourage you to ask God to constantly lead you into new and uncomfortable things. Things that will grow your faith, hope and trust in Him. Things that will grow your love for Him and the outpouring of His love for you into others. Live a life full of passion for Him. 

He is teaching me what this looks like each and every day. Right now, Tauranga is the city He has me in. In a few months, it will be somewhere else in the world. My year will more than likely end back at home in Texas. This is the journey He has me on, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I have never before understood living life in surrender to Him so clearly, and I'm sure He will continue to blow my mind with the concept.

A friend of mine recently described to me a beautiful picture of a jar full of water. It had cracks in it, which allowed the water to continue to flow out as it was continuously being replenished. I pray that you would live such a life as this of surrender to God, that you may intimately know Him and remain open to letting Him use you to bring others into that same intimacy with Him.

Much love,

Cambri

The New Zealand adventure has begun...again!

I made it to Tauranga for the start of another school. Leaving home again was hard, to say the least. God blessed my time at home so much with my family, friends and a really great job. To be called out of the comfortable and into something new is always challenging, even though I knew a little better what to expect this time than last time. After I arrived, it felt like I had never left. A lot of things are the same, but a few things are different. Different people, little changes around the base, and I’m quite a bit different than the first time I came. God is faithful, and He truly is always with me. I know he goes before and behind me. I could feel it the whole time I was preparing to leave, on the trip here and after I got here. When we walk in obedience to Him and say yes to Him above everything else, it causes us to cling to Him even tighter as we let go of other things we love. It was painful for me, but so worth it.

God is awesome, and has already shown me so much in the past few days. We have had the opportunity to ease into life here, and will hit staff training hard in the coming week. I met up with a fellow student and a few of the leaders from my school. It’s been great to get to see them for a short time as they have been preparing to leave for outreach with the current school. Almost all of the Justice Reach staff has arrived, and I can already say that I am excited to work with them over the coming months as we serve God and the school and learn a few new things ourselves.

I have felt so loved by all of my friends and family across my home nation and across other nations. Your support and prayers have meant so much, and God has used them to bless me immensely.

Much love,

Cambri

A Message Long Overdue

I successfully posted one blog update during my Discipleship Training School with YWAM over the summer before I went on outreach and created a new blog with my team. Now, I believe I am long overdue for an update to Making Movements.

God is leading me back to YWAM for another stint with Justice Reach. This time around, I will be on DTS staff helping to lead the students of the January Justice Reach school. I am very excited about the role God is calling me into, and my prayer of surrender to Him continues to be Micah 6:8. I will have the honor of coming alongside and helping disciple the students through both the lecture and outreach phases as they complete their DTS. I cannot wait to meet everyone in the school that is to be my New Zealand family for the next five months. I am also excited in anticipation of what God has for me to learn to help grow me into a better leader and equip me for what He has in store for Justice Reach Houston.

I was able to book my flight earlier this week, and my departure date is set for the end of December. These past four months at home have been a great time of reconnecting with friends and family and having multiple opportunities to share what God taught me over the course of my DTS. He blessed me with amazing work opportunities during this time, and brought new and inspiring people into my life that have been such an encouragement to me in this journey.

Please be in prayer that everything will go smoothly with my trip to New Zealand, and that God will be a comfort to my family and I as we part ways again for the next five months. Also, please remember to cover the January Justice Reach DTS in prayer, for both the staff and students. He has given me a heart for unity, and that is specifically what I have been praying for our school.

Kia ora! Hello from New Zealand!

Kia ora! Hello from New Zealand!

I feel so blessed to be able to spend the lecture phase of my DTS in such a beautiful place that perfectly reflects the creative character of my God. The first day or two were a little hard because I missed home so much, but as soon as the school started I hit the ground running and haven’t had too much time to be homesick. Before I left, everyone asked me what my greatest fear was about coming here. I assumed they thought it would have something to do with the outreach phase, but it didn’t. My greatest fear was that I wouldn’t connect with any of the people I would be living with for five months. I am so pleased to share that this group truly became my overseas family before the first week was over. I am grateful that God has called each one of them here, for the dynamics of the group would be so different if there was even the slightest change. The sense of trust we are learning to have in each other is so valuable. We love to laugh together and cry together. They are so understanding of the fact that I cry with every emotion, and some of them even cry with me. In honor of Frozen, we have adopted the phrase, “Yoo-hoo! Family!” as our own. This is quite amusing when we are out and about. Also, having lived in the south my whole life, I’ve never been used to my traits being different to some people. They find my use of “y’all” and my love of sweet tea so very “southern”. Ha.

We just completed our fourth week. God has moved so much in my life in the past month. It would be impossible to share with you all the amazing things I’ve learned, but I will do my best to highlight the majority. Week one was orientation week, just getting the feel of the schedule, expectations and work duties. Of course it was about learning to have fun together as well. We spent an entire day that week doing our own version of the Amazing Race. Our awesome staff put it together in order for us to learn to work together in teams, and to get to know the city that is to be our home for three months. It was such fun, but so challenging! One of the tasks we had to complete was hiking (not even halfway) up this place called the mount and getting our next clue. Let me just say, I did not realize just how out of shape I was until I came here and routinely started climbing ginormous hills. When we reached the location that contained our clue, suffice to say I was pretty worn out. We noticed a water bottle next to the clues and assumed it was for us to drink. My teammate is such a gentleman and let me take a sip first, but as I took a drink, I quickly realized it was not water and began spitting out black stuff. I was a little panicked not knowing what it was. The piece of paper that was supposed to contain the clue was blank, so we decided to head back down. If only we had realized the black stuff in the bottle was ink to make the clue on the paper visible! We may have saved the second trip up the mount…anyway, I’m not sure what everyone thought of me after I had such a dumb moment, but thankfully they just accepted me for who I am. Ha. We ended up coming in third place out of four, which the uncompetitive spirit in me was happy with. The next day was a bit heavier. We shared our stories with each other, and just jumped into the nitty gritty stuff in our life right away. It was freeing as well as healing for many people as we prayed over each other.

The second week we learned about the nature and character of God. The one thing that I think made the biggest impact for me, was working through discouragement about not feeling like I was hearing God’s voice. As I said, our schedule is pretty packed. Each morning we have something different to begin our day after we complete our “morning blitz” chores. Monday mornings are whanau time, which is Maori for family time (the Maori are the native people here in NZ). Tuesday and Thursday mornings are worship, and Wednesday and Friday mornings are intercession. I have never really experienced intercession before, so I was so excited for our first day when we learned about what it actually entails, including some useful tools for preparing our hearts before we begin. Each intercession time we pray for different things. So far, we have spent some time in prayer for the issue of poverty, the issue of suicide in New Zealand, Afghanistan, and the girls from Nigeria that were kidnapped. Through our times of intercession, God has already taught me so much about hearing His voice through pictures and scripture references. Yesterday our topic was based on our justice stream for the week, which was genocide and abortion. We ended up having a time of creative intercession. This involved splitting into four different groups: song, drawing, painting and dance. We were able to pick which group to go with, so I chose painting. We prayed through the steps of preparing our hearts, and during our time of prayer, God gave me a picture of an unborn baby within an apple, as the pupil of an eye. This came along with Psalm 17:8, which says, "Keep me as the apple of the eye; Hide me in the shadow of Your wings". A few people also got a sense of darkness, but that God can work through any situation to redeem. This influenced the background of our painting, which transitioned from darkness to light. It was really awesome to experience God using our creative abilities in order to intercede.

The third week was on identity. Our speaker for that week is such an awesome woman of God, and I felt so blessed to have the opportunity to get to hear the wisdom God has given her. She really took the time to get to know us and invest in us. This is the one hard thing that I am already realizing about YWAM; there are many relationships formed, and many goodbyes said, but it’s very cool to know people from all over the world. In my DTS alone we have people from Canada, USA, UK, Mexico, Switzerland and the Philippines. 

I experienced such freedom during that week. I have struggled my whole life with feeling that I never had a talent. Not that I’m terrible at everything I do, but I never had that one thing that I felt made me special and set me apart. What God showed me during this week though, is that He has given me gifts and talents. He has given me the gift of encouragement and strong faith, as well as a spirit of acceptance and hospitality. He has used the people here to show me just how important the talent of making people feel welcome, comfortable, loved and accepted can be. The two compliments I have received the most since being here are: that I have warm eyes and a motherly spirit. It seems God knew what He was doing when he created me, with the talents and character traits that would mesh so well.

This past week has been on relationships, no, not just romantic relationships, in fact, the majority of the week was on how we relate with God. We reviewed the first and greatest commandment, which is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul strength and mind and to love your neighbor as yourself. We focused in on loving God with our minds and the importance of learning to love studying scripture. One of the biggest things that I learned this week was this: I cannot honor God and effectively love the people I am in relationship with, if I hate myself. In order to love my neighbor, I have to first know who I am. My identity is found in Christ.

I continued to experience even more freedom this week. I have been set free from the strongholds of shame and rejection that I have held onto for most of my life. The sin of regret and spirit of unworthiness I have carried around for so long are gone. This doesn’t mean I won’t still struggle, but the more these things are brought into the light, the easier the load will be. I know the process of being refined will continue for the rest of my life…what a powerful thing to experience freedom in Christ!

We also had a very special time on Thursday morning. The men in our DTS and on staff, prepared a very special surprise breakfast for all of us ladies. They requested that we wear formal attire, and escorted us into an atmosphere quite like something out of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. Maybe it just felt like that because they had the soundtrack playing... They took our orders, served us and made us feel so special. They had hung twine from the ceiling that held encouragement notes. The amount of planning and the careful attention to detail was very impressive. We felt so honored that they would take the time, not only to serve us, but also put so much thought into what we would enjoy. In the end, they had cards for each of us in which they had written the things they recognized in our character and how God created us. I have to mention that one of my favorites said, “Brings a Southern Comfort”. But not only did they make these cards for us, they took the time to come to each of us individually and read them aloud. We had a time afterward to give feedback on our experience. It turns out the breakfast was not all about us, but also helping the guys become men. Hearing the stories from some of the ladies about how that was the first time they felt so cherished brought tears to my eyes. What meant the most to me, was that it wasn’t a romantic thing. I think women tend to expect to be treated the way they treated us if they are in a relationship. It was so refreshing to be cherished as a lady by these men who are my friends.

Our justice stream lectures have been interesting, heart wrenching and thought-provoking. We have covered topics such as the definitions of justice and mercy, poverty, compassion, genocide and abortion. We have been walking through Old Testament scriptures to take a look at God’s definition for justice. The hard thing is, there is not a clear definition and justice is not always fairness. What may seem unfair to us is still just in God’s eyes. It’s been a very difficult process for many of us to work through some of the things God allowed in scripture. Many times, I have had to wrestle, but come to the conclusion that I have to decide that I still believe my God is sovereign, just and merciful, even if I can’t understand.

“We believe something not when we say we do or even when we believe we do, but when we act as if we do.” Gary Haugen